A freelance security consultant and
Handler at SANS Internet Storm Center has discovered a rather interesting
exploit in Microsoft Word, one
that allows an attacker to abuse the productivity program's ability to auto-update
links. This is a feature that is enabled by default—when you add links
to external sources like URLs, World with automatically update them without any
prompts. Therein lies the issue.

…In this case,
the Word files tries to access the malicious RTF file. If it succeeds, it downloads a JavaScript
payload. According to Mertens, the link
update is triggered without user interaction or without a prompt warning to the
user that such an action will take place.

…But its
elevation by the president is the latest product of years of debates over how
the United States should structure, support, and prioritize its cybersecurity
operations — debates that will probably intensify now, rather than resolve
themselves.

For example, Trump added in his statement that Defense
Secretary James Mattis was looking into “the possibility of separating United
States Cyber Command from the National Security Agency.” Since its creation in 2009, CYBERCOM has lived
under the NSA’s roof at Fort Meade, depended on NSA’s resources, and shared its
commander with NSA, as well: The commanding officer of CYBERCOM has
historically been the “dual hatted” NSA director.

There are plenty of pros and cons to a CYBERCOM-NSA split, most of
which boil down to bureaucratic wranglings over who’s responsible for what and
when. But one issue that’s helped spur
the divorce talk is the evolution of different missions for the two agencies. NSA has historically operated as a
“collection” entity, stealthily intercepting communications and hoovering up
all the details in them. CYBERCOM, on
the other hand, has been trying its hand as a “disruption” entity, taking
offensive actions against hackers and enemies. It’s hard to run both kinds of ops on a single
target through a single point of entry.

I haven’t made many comments about the capability of
satellite imaging recently.Apparently,
at least one company has found even commercial grade images adequate for its
purpose.

Roofr,
which will be graduating from Y Combinator (YC) next week, developed a
satellite imagery software that analyzes the state of your roof to determine
whether it needs to be replaced.

…The
Toronto-based startup offers customers a free online quote using its satellite
imagery software, which takes the square footage and slope of the roof. It is currently using a Google API to capture
satellite images from Google Earth.

The team then connects customers with vetted contractors
who provide full replacements for any type of roof, including cedar, slate, and
metal.

Another step towards replacing lawyers with AI?(Are you sure that’s a human Judge on the
other end?)

Tech behemoths Google, Facebook and Amazon are feeling the
heat from the far-left and the far-right, and even the center is starting to
fold.

Why it matters: Criticism over the companies' size,
culture and overall influence in society is getting louder as they infiltrate
every part of our lives. Though it's
mostly rhetoric rather than action at the moment, that could change quickly in
the current political environment.

Not that private investors have noticed. The IPO market
remains anemic for technology companies, and the M&A market isn’t faring
that much better. Yet investors continue
to pour money into venture-capital firms, and those firms continue to pour
money into technology startups—even the so-called unicorns valued at more than
$1 billion.

This has got to be better than forcing everyone in the
room to listen to the entire score of Der
Ring des Nibelungen each time you get a call. (Okay, maybe not numbers 5 and 8)

Friday, August 18, 2017

It seems that Security is never considered when using a
new technology.Is there some assumption
that someone else will take care of all that “Security Stuff?”Also, what makes anyone believe that a
password is sufficient security?

A leading US supplier of voting machines confirmed on
Thursday that it exposed the personal information of more than 1.8 million
Illinois residents.

State authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
were alerted this week to a major data leak exposing the names, addresses,
dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers, and party affiliations of over
a million Chicago residents. Some
driver’s license and state ID numbers were also exposed.

Jon Hendren, who works for the cyber resilience firm UpGuard,
discovered the breach on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) device that was not secured by a password. The voter data was then downloaded by cyber
risk analyst Chris Vickery who determined Election Systems & Software
(ES&S) controlled the data. ES&S provides voting machines and services
in at least 42 states.

Well, this sounds like an epic FAIL on the City of
Yonker’s part, doesn’t it?

City
of Yonkers – Information Technology (Westchester County)
The IT department’s acceptable computer use policy was not signed or
acknowledged by all employees and city officials have also not classified
personal, private and sensitive information based on its level of sensitivity
and the potential impact should that data be disclosed, altered or destroyed
without authorization. In addition, city
officials have not ensured that employees received adequate cyber security
training and have not adopted a breach notification policy or a disaster
recovery plan.

Democratic lawmakers are calling for an independent
investigation into how the Federal Communications Commission responded to a
reported cyberattack in May that crippled the agency’s comment filing system.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Frank
Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) sent a letter
to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Thursday that cast doubt on
the FCC’s version of the incident.

“While the FCC and the FBI have responded to Congressional
inquiries into these [distributed denial of service] attacks, they have not
released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an
attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun
to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its
systems,” the letter reads.

“As a result, questions remain about the attack itself and
more generally about the state of cybersecurity at the FCC — questions that
warrant an independent review.”

…To test their
method, the researchers analyzed
more than 370 million emails received by a large enterprise’s employees between
March 2013 and January 2017.

The first part of the detection method relies on the
analysis of two key components: domain reputation features and sender
reputation features. The domain
reputation feature involves analyzing the link included in an email to see if
it poses a risk. A URL is considered
risky if it has not been visited by many employees from within an organization,
or if it has never been visited until very recently.

The sender reputation feature aims to identify spoofing of
the sender’s name in the From header, a previously unseen attacker using a name
and email address closely resembling a known or authoritative entity,
exploitation of compromised user accounts, and suspicious email content (i.e.
messages that reference accounts and credentials, or ones that invoke a sense
of urgency).

On 31 July, the Russian data
protection authority, Roskomnadzor, issued guidance for data operators on the
drafting of privacy policies to comply with Russian data protection law. Russia’s 2006 privacy law – Federal Law No.
152-FZ of 27 July 2006 “On Personal Data” (Personal Data Law) – requires, among
other things, that Russian data operators must adopt a privacy policy that
describes how they process personal data. This notice requirement is similar to the
approach in Europe. Furthermore, data
operators shall publish such a policy online when personal data is collected
online or otherwise provide unrestricted access to the policy when personal
data is collected offline. The guidance
– although non-binding and recommendatory in nature – emphasizes the
regulator’s compliance expectations and should therefore be taken into account
by organizations acting as data operators in Russia.

On Thursday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
that Uber user Spencer Meyer assented to the company’s mandatory arbitration
requirement when he clicked a button to complete his registration for the Uber
smartphone app. The 2nd Circuit’s
decision, written by Judge Denny Chin for a panel that also included Judges Reena Raggi
and Susan
Carney, rejected Meyer's argument that he wasn’t on fair notice
of the arbitration provision because the Uber registration process presented
the app’s terms of service only via hyperlink.

That's great news for companies with
smartphone apps – and not just because the court held that app purchasers can
be bound by a “sign-in wrap” that folds assent to terms of service into
registration for the app. The 2nd
Circuit also confirmed the obvious: Now that Internet-connected devices have
become nearly ubiquitous, smartphone
users ought to know that registering for an app has legal consequences.

“Emerging across many disciplines are questions about
algorithmic ethics – about the values embedded in artificial intelligence and
big data analytics that increasingly replace human decision making. Many are concerned that an algorithmic society
is too opaque to be accountable for its behavior. An individual can be denied parole or denied
credit, fired or not hired for reasons she will never know and cannot be
articulated. In the public sector, the
opacity of algorithmic decision making is particularly problematic both because
governmental decisions may be especially weighty, and because
democratically-elected governments bear special duties of accountability. Investigative journalists have recently
exposed the dangerous impenetrability of algorithmic processes used in the
criminal justice field – dangerous because the predictions they make can be
both erroneous and unfair, with none the wiser. We set out to test the limits of transparency
around governmental deployment of big data analytics, focusing our
investigation on local and state government use of predictive algorithms. It is here, in local government, that
algorithmically-determined decisions can be most directly impactful. And it is here that stretched agencies are
most likely to hand over the analytics to private vendors, which may make
design and policy choices out of the sight of the client agencies, the public,
or both. To see just how impenetrable
the resulting “black box” algorithms are, we filed 42 open records requests in
23 states seeking essential information about six predictive algorithm
programs. We selected the most
widely-used and well-reviewed programs, including those developed by for-profit
companies, nonprofits, and academic/private sector partnerships. The goal
was to see if, using the open records process, we could discover what policy
judgments these algorithms embody, and could evaluate their utility and
fairness. To do this work, we
identified what meaningful “algorithmic transparency” entails. We found that in almost every case, it wasn’t
provided. Over-broad assertions of trade
secrecy were a problem. But contrary to
conventional wisdom, they were not the biggest obstacle. It will not usually be necessary to release
the code used to execute predictive models in order to dramatically increase
transparency. We conclude that
publicly-deployed algorithms will be sufficiently transparent only if (1)
governments generate appropriate records about their objectives for algorithmic
processes and subsequent implementation and validation; (2) government
contractors reveal to the public agency sufficient information about how they
developed the algorithm; and (3) public agencies and courts treat trade secrecy
claims as the limited exception to public disclosure that the law requires. Although it
would require a multi-stakeholder process to develop best practices for record
generation and disclosure, we present what we believe are eight principal types
of information that such records should ideally contain.”

Community College of Denver will be setting up two
telescopes to safely view the 93% partial solar eclipse on August 21st. One telescope is a Coronado Solarmax 60mm with
an H-alpha solar filter, the other is a 6" Celestron scope with a
broadband solar filter. Safe
viewing glasses provided.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Shipping company Maersk says June cyberattack could cost it
up to $300 million

Container shipping company A.P. Moller Maersk on Tuesday said it
expects that computer issues triggered by the NotPetya cyberattack will cost
the company as much as $300 million in lost revenue.

"In the last week of the [second] quarter we were hit
by a cyber-attack, which mainly impacted Maersk Line, APM Terminals and
Damco," Maersk CEO Soren Skou said in a statement.
"Business volumes were negatively
affected for a couple of weeks in July and as a consequence, our Q3 results
will be impacted. We expect that the
cyber-attack will impact results negatively by USD 200-300m."

Maersk Line was able to take bookings from existing
customers two days after the attack, and things gradually got back to normal
over the following week, the company said. It said it did not lose third-party data as a
result of the attack.

Ardia, David S., Privacy and Court Records: Online Access
and the Loss of Practical Obscurity (August 4, 2017). University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2017,
No. 5, 2017. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3013704

“Court records present a conundrum for privacy advocates. Public access to the courts has long been a
fundamental tenant of American democracy, helping to ensure that our system of
justice functions fairly and that citizens can observe the actions of their
government. Yet court records contain an
astonishing amount of private and sensitive information, ranging from social
security numbers to the names of sexual assault victims. Until
recently, the privacy harms that attended the public disclosure of court
records were generally regarded as insignificant because court files were
difficult to search and access.But this “practical obscurity” is rapidly
disappearing as the courts move from the paper-based world of the twentieth
century to an interconnected, electronic world where physical and temporal
barriers to information are eroding. These changes are prompting courts — and
increasingly, legislatures — to reconsider public access to court records. Although this reexamination can be beneficial,
a number of courts are abandoning the careful balancing of interests that has
traditionally guided judges in access disputes and instead are excluding whole
categories of information, documents, and cases from public access. This approach, while superficially appealing,
is contrary to established First Amendment principles that require
case-specific analysis before access can be restricted and is putting at risk
the public’s ability to observe the functioning of the courts and justice
system. This article pushes back against the categorical exclusion of information
in court records. In doing
so, it makes three core claims. First,
the First Amendment provides a qualified right of public access to all court
records that are material to a court’s exercise of its adjudicatory power. Second, before a court can restrict public
access, it must engage in a case-specific evaluation of the privacy and public
access interests at stake. Third, per se
categorical restrictions on public access are not permissible. These conclusions do not leave the courts
powerless to protect privacy, as some scholars assert. We must discard the notion that the protection
of privacy is exclusively the job of judges and court staff. Instead, we need to
shift the responsibility for protecting privacy to lawyers and litigants, who
should not be permitted to include highly sensitive information in court files
if it is not relevant to the case. Of course, we cannot eliminate all private and
sensitive information from court records, but as long as courts continue to
provide physical access to their records, the First Amendment does not preclude
court administrators from managing electronic access in order to retain some of
the beneficial aspects of practical obscurity. By minimizing the inclusion of unnecessary
personal information in court files and by limiting the extent of electronic
access to certain types of highly sensitive information, we can protect privacy
while at the same time ensuring transparency and public accountability.”

“In this study, we document
polarization in the media ecosystem that is distinctly asymmetric. Whereas the left half of our spectrum is
filled with many media sources from center to left, the right half of the
spectrum has a substantial gap between center and right. The core of attention from the center-right to
the left is large mainstream media organizations of the center-left. The right-wing media sphere skews to the far
right and is dominated by highly partisan news organizations,” co-author and
principal investigator Yochai Benkler stated. In addition to Benkler, the report was
authored by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, and Ethan
Zuckerman.

The fact that media coverage has become more polarized in
general is not new, but the extent to which right-wing sites have become
partisan is striking, the report says. The study found that on the conservative side,
more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center
of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations. Robert Faris, the Berkman Klein Center’s
research director, noted, “Consistent with concerns over echo chambers and
filter bubbles, social media users on the left and the right rarely share
material from outside their respective spheres, except where they find coverage
that is favorable to their choice of candidate. A key difference between the right and left is
that Trump supporters found substantial coverage favorable to their side in
left and center-left media, particularly coverage critical of Clinton. In contrast, the messaging from right-wing
media was consistently pro-Trump.” Conservative
opposition to Trump was strongest in the center-right, the portion of the
political spectrum that wielded the least influence in media coverage of the
election. In this recently-emerged
universe, Breitbart stands at the center of a right-wing media ecosystem and is
surrounded by sites like Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the
Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed, according
to the report’s analysis.”

I’ve been trying to tell my International students about
the rules of discovery.They seem to
find it a very difficult concept.

Waymo may get an edge over rival Uber as the two head into
an explosive trade secrets trial this fall after a federal judge on
Wednesday said he’ll likely tell the jury how Uber’s lawyers “misled the court”
and repeatedly failed to produce documents that could be important in the case.

…Uber’s lawyers
from Morrison & Foerster recently disclosed that their firm has some
information taken from Levandowski’s electronic devices. Waymo is convinced that information contains
stolen documents, which it says Uber’s team spent months hiding from the court.

“Wrong,” Uber’s lawyer, Arturo Gonzalez, said Wednesday. His firm has some information, he said, but
not the allegedly stolen documents.

But U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who is presiding
over the case, seemed to side with Waymo.

“I am concerned that Mr. Gonzalez failed to disclose that
he had the documents and took a long time to come clean,” Alsup said. “Maybe he can get on the stand and explain it
away. But I am inclined … to tell the
jury exactly this scenario: that he was ordered to come clean, did not come
clean, ordered to come clean again, and did not come clean — finally in June or
July came clean.”

Earlier this week I shared some ideas for creating and using your own augmented reality experiences in
school. Metaverse is the free platform that makes it possible for
teachers and students to create their own augmented reality experiences. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly
recommend taking a crack at making your own augmented reality experience. As some participants in my workshops this
summer demonstrated, you really can create your own augmented reality
experiences in as little as ten minutes. Of course, the more time you spend using
Metaverse, the more complex and robust you can make your augmented reality
applications.

This weekend Metaverse is kicking-off a hackathon for teachers. The Metaverse Hackathon starts on Saturday, August 19th and
runs through Saturday, August 26th.The
purpose of the hackathon is to showcase the creative augmented reality
experiences that teachers make for educational uses. The winner of the Metaverse Hackathon will
receive $200 in classroom supplies. You can
get all of the details and register for the Metaverse Hackathon here. I can't wait
to see what everyone creates.

…MoviePass has
actually been around for several years, but high prices and countless
restrictions have prevented it from really taking off. But that may all be about to change…

MoviePass is now offering unlimited movies in theaters for
$9.95-per-month. The only restrictions
are that you’re limited to one film every day, and 3D and IMAX movies are off
the menu entirely. But beyond that it’s
anything goes. Which sounds too good to
be true, to be honest.

How it works is that you pay MoviePass $9.95 every month
via a debit card. You then visit your
local movie theater as usual, but MoviePass will pay for your ticket. If you go once a month you’ll just about break
even, but if you go more often than that you’ll be saving some serious cash.

This could be a win-win for everyone involved. However, according to Variety, AMC is already trying to prevent
MoviePass subscriptions from being used at its theaters. The chain claims the pricing makes this an
unsustainable model which will harm the movie business in the long run.

This publication provides a catalog of security and privacy controls for federal
information systems and organizations to protect organizational operations and
assets, individuals, other organizations, and the Nation from a diverse set of
threats including hostile attacks, natural disasters, structural failures,
human errors, and privacy risks. The
controls are flexible and customizable and implemented as part of an
organization-wide process to manage risk. The controls address diverse requirements
derived from mission and business needs, laws, Executive Orders, directives,
regulations, policies, standards, and guidelines. The publication describes how to develop
specialized sets of controls, or overlays, tailored for specific types of
missions and business functions, technologies, environments of operation, and
sector-specific applications. Finally,
the consolidated catalog of controls addresses security and privacy from a
functionality perspective (i.e., the strength of functions and mechanisms) and
an assurance perspective (i.e., the measure of confidence in the security or
privacy capability). Addressing both
functionality and assurance ensures that information technology products and
the information systems that rely on those products are sufficiently
trustworthy.”

Helping my students understand the need to design security
and privacy into systems from the beginning.And to provide some kind of Metric as part of the design!

Apple, Facebook, Google and other tech giants tell the Supreme
Court to protect cellphone data in a key, upcoming case

…The case before
the nation’s justices is Carpenter
vs. United States, and it stems from a 2011 investigation into a series of
robberies in Detroit. As part of the
probe, law enforcement officials obtained information from nearby cell towers
to determine the whereabouts of one of the suspects, Timothy Carpenter, without
first obtaining a warrant.

As the Supreme Court considers the matter —
including questions as to whether law enforcement must
demonstrate probable cause before it can seek that location data — tech
giants stressed in a new amicus brief that they “do not take a position on the
outcome of this case.”

But the major players that signed it — including
Airbnb, Cisco, Dropbox and Verizon, the only telecom giant to sign — do argue
the need for greater Fourth Amendment safeguards “to ensure that the law
realistically engages with Internet-based technologies and with people’s
expectations of privacy in their digital data.”

I want to play the “sound of doom” when my students open
their exams.Is that cruel?I certainly hope so!

Ticket prices too high? MoviePass gets you into theaters for
$10 a month

…even if
audiences are currently fed up with the movie industry, a company called
MoviePass is betting it can get them back in the seats, offering a movie a day
for only $10 per month.

Founded in 2011, MoviePass is a subscription service that
allows users to see movies in theaters (one movie per day) without buying a
ticket each time. Instead, the company
pays for your ticket when you swipe your MoviePass card.

If it sounds crazy that a company could afford to let
users watch movies every day for only $10 a month, it’s not. The idea was similar to insurance: Not every
user will actually see $10 worth of movies a month, so they end up subsidizing
the users who do.

“At Free Law Project, we have gathered millions of court
documents over the years, but it’s with distinct pride that we announce that we
have now completed our biggest crawl ever. After nearly a year of work, and with support
from the U.S. Department of Labor and Georgia State University, we have
collected every free written order and opinion that is available in PACER. To accomplish
this we used PACER’s “Written Opinion Report,” which
provides many opinions for free. This collection contains approximately 3.4
million orders and opinions from approximately 1.5 million federal district and
bankruptcy court cases dating back to 1960. More than four hundred thousand of these
documents were scanned and required OCR, amounting to
nearly two million pages of text extraction that we completed for this project.
All of the documents amassed are
available for search in the RECAP Archive of PACER documents
and via our APIs. New
opinions will be downloaded every night to keep the collection up to date.”

Costco made $3.7 million selling ‘Tiffany’ rings. Now it must
pay $19 million to the real Tiffany.

Costco must pay the storied jewelry
company Tiffany & Co. more than $19 million for selling about 2,500
diamond rings falsely identified on store signs as “Tiffany” rings, a federal
judge ruled Monday.

Costco’s management “displayed at best a cavalier attitude
toward Costco’s use of the Tiffany name in conjunction with ring sales and
marketing,” U.S. District Judge of the Southern District of New York Laura Taylor
Swain wrote in her opinion.

…Swain wrote
Costco “provided credible evidence” of the practice of using the terms “Tiffany
setting” and “Tiffany style” generically throughout the jewelry industry.

The problem is Costco only used the word “Tiffany” when
describing the rings in its signage, suggesting they were made by the jeweler
rather than an imitation of its famous design.

Judge Edward Chen in the northern district of California
granted hiQ labs, an employment startup, a preliminary injunction that
forces LinkedIn to remove any barriers keeping hiQ from accessing public profile
information within 24 hours.

HiQ’s
operations depend on its ability to access public LinkedIn data.The company sells analytics to clients
including eBay, Capital One and GoDaddy that aim to help them with employee
retention and recruitment.

…LinkedIn argued
that users might not want to have employers tracking changes on their profiles,
for example if they are seeking a new job.

In his order, Chen argued that LinkedIn’s argument was
flawed.

…HiQ argues that
Linkedin’s attempts to limit the startup’s ability to use public profile data
is anti-competitive and is a violation of so-called data-scrappers free speech
rights.

Taking the lead from the President or something DoJ
thought up on their own?

Webhosting service DreamHost
has said that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has requested information on
everyone who visited DisruptJ20.org,
a website that was set up to organize political protests against the U.S.
administration.

…Central to the
request was information on the DistrupJ20.org website itself and its owner, but
where things get contentious is in relation to the site’s visitors. According to DreamHost, the DOJ’s request
includes 1.3 million IP addresses covering each device that connected to the
website. This was in addition to
“…contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an
effort to determine who simply visited the website,” according to a blog post. “This is, in our opinion, a strong example of
investigatory overreach and a clear abuse of government authority,” the
DreamHost statement added.

After challenging the DOJ’s request based on the
“overbreadth” of the warrant, DreamHost received a copy of an “order to compel”
filed by the DOJ in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that sought
to dismiss DreamHost’s counterarguments. Last week, DreamHost filed
its legal arguments in response.

Will this improve health or allow Aetna to more accurately
calculate their risk?

Top executives from both companies met last Thursday and
Friday in Southern California, according to CNBC. Myoung
Cha, who heads up Apple’s special health projects, led the
talks, with hospital chief medical information officers from across the U.S.
also in attendance.

"If your company is using
Cisco and Apple, then the combination of these should make that insurance cost
significantly less for you than it would if you were using some other personal
network side and the other operating system in the mobile area," Cook
said.

The idea is that insurers will be convinced to deliver
lower premiums to enterprises who standardize around Apple/Cisco solutions.

Those who do will not be required to subsidize those who
choose to use less secure combinations.

A great victory for the Dear Leader!And no doubt the President will take full
credit for it.

Quasi-vigilante?Name
someone you think might have been there?With a little tech (Phones that record video, video editors that can
isolate a face, facial recognition) this could become a popular game.Looks like it’s back to those pointy hood for
these people.

The internet gave white nationalists a platform to
organize their Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. It's also
giving counter-protesters a way to strip them of their anonymity.

A Twitter account called Yes, You're Racist has been naming and shaming
white supremacists who over the weekend protested a decision by Charlottesville
to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

The user of the account on Saturday asked followers, who currently
total more than 240,000, to send names and social media profiles of anyone they
recognized at the protests. The site has
identified at least nine protesters so far.

…The rapid use of
Twitter to crowdsource the identification of rally participants in real time
marks a new use of the platform.Twitter has strict rules about
disclosing personal information, such as intimate photos, Social Security
numbers and financial information. Identifying individuals from photographs taken in
public settings, such as the rally, doesn't appear to violate those rules.

What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of University
Library Books?: “…many librarians and scholars see the legacy of the
project differently. In fact, academics
now regularly tap into the reservoir of digitized material that Google helped
create, using it as a dataset they can query, even if they can’t consume full
texts. It’s a pillar of the humanities’
growing engagement with Big Data….That
rich resource has been put to several good uses. Through the HathiTrust Research
Center, scholars can tap into the Google Books corpus and conduct
computational analysis—looking for patterns in large amounts of text, for
instance—without breaching copyright. And
print-disabled users can use assistive technologies to read scanned books that
might otherwise be difficult if not impossible to find in accessible formats…”

Now you can have your car smell like your best friend or
fur baby. For National Dog Day on August
26 -- yes, that's a real thing and should be a federally recognized holiday --
you'll be able to claim a free "new dog smell" air freshener from
Autotrader.

It might seem like a cheap gimmick to get readers to click
on a site, but it's for a good cause. For every doge-smelling air freshener,
Autotrader will donate to Adopt-A-Pet.com. You'll be able to claim your air freshener and
contribute to the cause at this link starting on August 24.

Can a president be suspended from Twitter for threatening
to attack another country?

That's what some Twitter users, including
actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are
demanding, after President Trump tweeted Friday morning that U.S. “military solutions
are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

Critics of the president's tweet say the rhetoric reflects
a threat of violence against North Korea that violates Twitter's rules and terms of service.

Keeping up with your competitors or looking for ideas to
steal? Call it “surveillance of the competition?”

Late last year, Facebook employees used an internal
database of a sampling of mobile users’ activity to observe that usage of
Snap’s flagship app, Snapchat, wasn’t growing as quickly as before, people
familiar with the matter said.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.